Many of you have asked us in the past, how we plan to stay online should our domain be confiscated. Until now, we have never really had a firm answer. Some of you are familiar with our alternative domains at .EU and .ME but the vast majority will likely be stranded should something happen to our main .COM domain.
That is why we have partnered up with the people over at BlockAid, who run a DNS system designed to overcome domain seizure. OneDDL was one of the select sites allowed to try out the system while it was undergoing a closed beta test, and recently it was opened up to everyone. Join now for free!
The system works in a similar way to Google Public DNS or OpenDNS, with the exception that certain domains override the internet root. Essentially this means that if you use BlockAid and our domain is seized, you will still be able to access the site through our normal domain. You can use the service completely free of charge.
All the information you could ever need, and configuration instructions, are over at http://blockaid.me.
They are eager to hear what your thoughts are, so please feel free to air them in the comments of this post.
54 Comments
I fuckin love the idea of this
long live OneDDL and screw the government
at the bottom of the configuration page it says “We also advise that you install a FireFox plugin called AlertBox and setup an alert for the status page, to be checked once a day. If there are any changes it will then alert you.” can someone explain why this is helpful and what the “status page” is please.
oh and I’ve tried to check out the .me and .eu sites that oneddl has but to no avail. Any help on that would be much appreciated also.
steadygettingblown: We will update the status page if there are any issues, such as a disruption in the service. We advise that people install that addon because they are unlikely to check it often and therefore might not hear if we have a problem. If you install the addon and set it up for our status page, then the moment it changes, you will be notified.
As for the .me and .eu question, I am not in a position to answer, that is something one of the OneDDL admins must respond too.
Darn misleading product title, i thought there was finally software to allow men to enjoy butt fucking without protection…
@steadygettingblown
oneddl.eu and .me are back up domains for oneddl.com they currently just redirect back to the .com domain. in the event that we lost the .com and you weren’t using something like blockaid dns then you would hopefully be able to reach us on one of the other domains.
and re the alertbox thing from what i can tell it’s just them being super secure. be no problem without it.
To much hassle im afraid. Though i love this site, if it were ever to go down there are other means that i can get my content on the net.
The easiest solution is to transition now to the .me TLD. Instead of redirecting .me to .com do the reverse. Then go to Google’s webmaster tools and make sure you take ownership of the .com and the .me. Then set up your Google preferences to redirect all the .com caches and links to the .me TLD.
If you’re legitimately worried about TLD seizure, do it now, since rebranding and updating all the links later is going to really really suck – for everyone. Plus you’ll lose all your Google indexes if you don’t act ahead of time.
@asgar…
They are just as likely to seize the dot me domain.
But this blockaid thing is not really about us. We are just one site that will be protected by them. they’re trying to protect the internet at large from domain seizure. All your favourite sites.
The US government can grab a .com, but they don’t have jurisdiction in Montenegro, the owners of the .me TLD. It’s a different ball of wax entirely trying to grab such a domain.
Which is why we’ve seen a lot of .com TLDs seized or moved proactively to TLDs from other nations. I don’t know of any of these sites that have had non .com .net or .org domains seized by US authorities. And I don’t know of any other nation performing domain seizures. Better safe than sorry, IMO.
There are a lot of people, such as myself, that are not interested in another third-party DNS provider.
they don’t need jurisdiction in Montenegro. They’re all administered through icann and US companies are involved in the provision of internet service from top to bottom. It just takes a court to issue an injunction. Who knows what will happen. But there seems little point in moving unless we know.
But like i say that’s not really what this post is about. We are just one site. At the very least you should make a note of the dns servers one day they might keep you in touch with your favourite site of any kind
I have just have 2 Questions since I didn´t find the answers at your page:
Is it like p2p, were it is traceable back to me?
Is it working with the new IPv6, when they are coming.
i want to add (46.246.119.139 status.block.aid) to my host file but every time i try saving it doesntlet me, i tried many differnt ways of setting the authoruty but still cant get it to allow me, it would save in XP but windows 7 is a pain.
shaq: I believe you have to open the host file as administrator. Otherwise it wont save changes.
thanks but i already signed up for firefox add on called mafiafire redirector …
is this the new website trend ?
Mafiafire does the same thing.
@Heather:
It does not actually. As the name suggests, mafiafire is a redirector. So when a domain is seized, an alternative will need to be implemented for the plugin to redirect you.
With BlockAid, you can continue using the original domain, even after it has been seized. Furthermore, it is cross-browser compatible and even works with IE.
Thank you OneDDL for all of the work you do.
Yes great stuff OneDLL & blockaid.
Tried it out yesterday – seemed to slow my (already slow) line down a bit?
But this is a great Idea.
or you can make sure and get this add on if you’re using firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/
http://torrentfreak.com/firefox-add-on-undoes-u-s-government-domain-seizures-110414/
I think it’s safer than giving your whole DNS to some website…
Is my question too stupid?? Isn´t it true that blockaid uses the dns of the participants, can you please comment..
@q2bb – i’m not sure i fully understand the question. but blockaid is in every respect apart from in the event of domain seizure, like a regular dns service. I’m not sure if you are thinking of something like TOR. but this is just dns.
yeah, i know. but it´s peerDns, right? and i am just guessing it has something to do with my dns client… so, since i don´t have the time today to look it up, i was just hoping you can explain to me (a little bit) how it is working technically.
It just doesn’t seem like you understand the concept of DNS, otherwise you wouldn’t have said the things you’ve said. What a DNS is and how PeerDNS works is already explained on the BlockAid site. Further information on how DNS works can be found on wikipedia.
In response to your earlier comments: no it’s not like p2p. They do not keep records. And it’s not like “giving your DNS” to them. There’s not giving involved in DNS. PeerDNS IS the DNS, it does not use yours. It’s the other way around, YOU are using the their DNS.
okay??!; no, it isn´t and thank you
i just wasn´t familiar with the term p2p-dns and since i´m getting my ip from my dns-client i was just “guessing” i am getting another ip from this service…
anyway, due to your politeness i just invested 5min. to scroogle it and now comprehension takes place.
Good. I was hoping it wouldn’t come off as rude
:p
@q2bb,
I would like to point out, if your being assigned an IP address automatically, it is being assigned from a DHCP server, not a DNS server.
Your same DHCP server is likely also pushing DNS server IPs to you also.
From a technical standpoint.
The likes of blockaid are manually maintained DNS servers, ie. they will refuse BIND updates from peer DNS servers, other than established un-seized sites (Yahoo, blah blah). Filters are set for vulnerable sites likely to be seized, like OneD. They get cancelled.
DNS has no influence on your assigned IP address, that’s down to your ISP.
Manually setting these DNS servers ensures that you will always get onto OneDDL.com.
The government, whatever country can down the URL, but not the IP address (unless it’s a public hosting site, don’t ask – it is extremely complicated).
Technically, releasing and re-newing IP addresses (ipconfig /re……. will over-write your DNS settings). MACs seem to only like 2 DNS servers and do the Windows thing, unless you lock your settings.
Blockaid is probably off the grid secondary
This is a reasonable idea but it means using them for ALL of your DNS requests, if they start getting overwelmed your DNS requests could be slow and if they have an incorrect entry then you might be stuck for a while until they update it… Also if the gov or whoever down the WEB hosting of blockaid or oneddl then we need to wait for someone to tell blockaid to update the DNS to some other hosting provider somewhere…
Is it not the case that just putting oneddl.com in YOUR host file will basically do the same thing except that it won’t be changeable automatically by blockaid/oneddl…..?
Just thinking out loud so don’t start flaming! lol
@Coldfire: Thanks for your feedback but we have planned for this. We would have to be receiving over 100,000 requests per second for us to even start being overwhelmed and that is unlikely to happen, especially with modern day browser and OS DNS caches.
OneDDL also has control over their DNS records on our system, so should they move host, they can simply update it themselves.
As for governments, they have no reason to take us down as you say. We are not doing anything illegal. But there is a reason why we have two DNS servers, so should one be taken down, you will still have access to our service as normal until we fix or replace it.
You can place OneDDL in your hosts file, but it then becomes your duty to update it should anything ever happen to them. This can be quite a bit of hassle.
Fair play, thanks for replying. I hope it all works well if the time ever comes!
Like shaq, I cannot save changes to host file.
Sorry if I sound dumb, but how do you open the file as administrator as described by sgboy123?
I’m using Vista.
Thanks
Guys, just edit the host file as an administrator, you should be able to save it.
Thanks OneDDL for caring, some guy above was a little inconsiderate, whatever, most of us really appreciate the scene and how you guys try hard to share it instantly, keep it up.
I believe it ‘s right-click.
Right click and open it as an administrator and then edit it. If it still does not work then go into control panel and disable user account control, then restart and edit the file.
Cheers guys. The right click option wasn’t there for me, but the disabling of user account control did the trick.
Hello.
Does anyone know where the 4th episode of ‘Planet Dinosaurs’ is?]
Cheers great site!! The best in fact.
Thank you
this website is the best,
1DDL all the way
Doing a reverse lookup of oneddl.com gives 88.80.5.7 as the ip address, but if i enter that into my browser i just get “Really Expensive Hosting – So expensive, this is all we could afford!” lol
I was assuming that DNS would just return 88.80.5.7 when given oneddl.com as the name, so what else is happening here? (Just interested; i know keeping hold of the IP wouldn’t help if the site was relocated).
Well one IP could host multiple sites.
That is our web host.
Ah, of course. For some reason (i’m going with “it’s friday, leave me alone”), i thought each web site had it’s own IP. Doh!
Back to sleep i go….
thanks…
how do you know that blockaid is not a government sting designed to gather everyone’s info ?
@markk
Exactly… The government is EVERYWHERE muahahahhaha
Twitter @1ddl , is very easy ! Follow
How would I set my router to use this DNS service?
To the guys at Onedll and BlockAid.
Your awesome.
Thank you for taking the proactive steps to ensure that our internet is uncensored and free.
+1 internets to you.
It’s good to see that you’re prepared for an outage but I don’t see any reason for anyone rushing off to change their DNS nameservers. Just for the record, though BlockAid’s intentions seem good, both their DNS servers finished dead last on my computer in DNS Benchmark, a DNS name resolution speed test for Windows, against about 100 other servers. My ISP’s servers finished in first and second place.
The average cached name retrieval speed, which is what is most important, was 13 milliseconds for both the ISP’s servers. It was 156 and 167 milliseconds for the two BlockAid servers, which is much slower–a factor of around 12:1.
You might want to perform the test on your own computer before changing anything, because this would definitely slow down your internet browsing speed. You have to add the 2 BlockAid servers given on the configuration page.
In any case, you wouldn’t really have to, or want to, change over to their servers now. You can always do so if and when this domain name gets snatched. Then you can add the new IP address to your hosts file and change back to your regular DNS servers.
Shit, here is some very disturbing news about this very subject:
US judge orders hundreds of sites “de-indexed” from Google, Facebook
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/us-judge-orders-hundreds-of-sites-de-indexed-from-google-twitter-bing-facebook.ars
Googlers wouldn’t even find anything on this site, even with the domain protection proposed, if this happened here.
this dns will work if they approve s.o.p.a law?????
What happens if US passes SOPA OR PIPA?
Isn’t it simple to just use IP address instead of alias name? DNS servers ale just needed to translate alias name to IP address, so if you’ll operate on IP addresses only, all this DNS combinations are not needed…